Online SEO Press Sections Essential for Small Home-Based Businesses

Your Press Releases Will Have a Better Chance of Getting Discovered if Your Web Site has a Press Section with SEO Terms.

Press releases are important tools that small businesses can use to get and grow their businesses, yet most companies don’t leverage them nearly enough.

Once a release is sent out, most companies file it away, never to be seen again, when what they should be doing is adding it to a dedicated press section on their company web site. By creating a press section on the company web site, a business is creating a mountain of potential chances at pulling in traffic to its site. However, it’s important that those releases be written in a search engine friendly manner to start with.

“Every business has a reason to use press releases, but they should continue to use them long past the initial date they were sent out,” explains Cher Murphy, president of Cher Murphy PR ( www.CherMurphyPr.com ), a public relations firm with offices in Miami and Virginia. “Having an online press section is an effective way to bring traffic to the site, which will help translate to more business.”

Online Searches Warrant a Press Section Around the world, there are over a billion Internet users. Each day, there are millions of online searches. Research has shown that increasingly people are doing online searches before making buying decisions. They are essentially doing their “homework” before moving forward with seeking services and products. Businesses that effectively use search engine optimization (SEO) are successful in showing up in search engine results, which ultimately drive traffic to their sites. This can translate to additional business for those who play their cards right.

“Many people, needing a product or service, don’t necessarily know a company’s name or web site address, so they start by doing online searches,” says Murphy. “If a company has a press section with releases that contain SEO terms, it has a good chance of coming up in the search results. It’s an easy and cost-effective way to bring potential customers to a site.”

Optimizing Releases In creating an online press section, businesses should always make sure the releases have been optimized. To do this effectively, remember to:

Use SEO keywords that are relevant to the business, service, and geographic location. For example, if a business is selling bread in Boulder, it’s important to use those words so it helps to target the appropriate traffic.

Try to keep the keyword usage to around five percent of the overall text. If a company tries to use too many keywords in the release, it may be penalized by the search engines, or have a release that doesn’t read correctly.

Scatter the keywords throughout the release instead of loading the first couple of paragraphs with them.

Always have a direct web site link from the release to the company site.

Leave the releases online, even after they are considered old. The more opt...

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